Product Manager

Available Locations: Hybrid - Austin

About the Department

As a Product Manager at Cloudflare, you are responsible for building products that improve the way that the Internet works. Product Managers at Cloudflare sit at the intersection of software development, design, and business strategy. We shape high-level product goals but also get our hands dirty. On an average day, you might pitch a concept to senior leadership, create a launch plan with marketing, work with designers to conduct user research, prototype a new feature, iterate on a spec, analyze usage data, and pair with an engineer on implementation. We have ultimate responsibility for understanding our client needs, influencing business strategy, feature specification, and working with engineering to develop our software.

What You’ll Do

This is a pivotal role at Cloudflare. As such, the successful candidate will need excellent communication, planning and documentation skills, along with a very strong grasp of software architecture and layer 7 technologies, and also excellent business acumen. 

As a Product Manager you will be responsible for working closely with other Product Managers on the Application Performance team, overseeing and working on several of our core products, specifically DNS. This is a tremendous opportunity to make a big difference in a rapidly growing company. 

Successful candidates will be responsible for driving the continuous improvement of Cloudflare DNS through innovative and new products and features, working with engineering to build features and releases that power one of the world’s largest DNS systems. A strong technical understanding and confidence discussing low-level ideas with our engineering organization is a must.

You should also have a strong business acumen. DNS is a foundational product for Cloudflare, and you need to be comfortable in customer facing situations and competitive situations, where you will work closely with our sales team to drive deals to a win. 

As a member of the growing team of product managers your responsibilities will include:

• Own the product vision for your area. Ensure that it aligns with the overall product and company vision.
• Evangelize the vision constantly so all stakeholders are aligned, have context and understand where we are going.
• Represent the customer. Be the champion and voice of customers. Build intimate, personal customer relationships. Bring the customer's voice into the creation process.
• Manage the roadmap. Make tough tactical prioritization decisions while helping the company think long-term. Build trust with stakeholders by maintaining an understandable, accurate roadmap.
• Author use cases and prioritize requirements. Translate market observations and customer feedback into a prioritized product backlog.  Author use cases based on specific real-world product applications and extrapolate detailed product requirements for the scenarios.
• Collaborate across teams. We win or lose as a team. Product managers play a critical role in creating alignment between engineering teams and stakeholders. A collaborative attitude is essential to the job.
• Measure success. Own the measures used to define success for your product. Success measures must be defined at the inception of a product and tracked throughout its lifecycle. Make measures visible to all stakeholders and interpret them into actionable conclusions and new hypotheses.
• Develop new opportunities. With your finger on the pulse of the market, the customers and the engineering teams, you are uniquely positioned to discover and develop new opportunities. 
• Own the execution of day-to-day work, OKRs, and product strategy on a weekly and quarterly basis, ensuring the team focuses and gets projects over the finish line.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

The ideal candidate is entrepreneurial-minded and thrives in a fast-paced and goal-driven environment. You have outstanding communication and collaboration skills and are able to work with a diverse group, get consensus, and drive the product forward. You are execution focused and emphasize getting things done while paying attention to important details. You have experience working with enterprise, SaaS, or security technologies. You have a passion for building SaaS products and want to solve the problems of performance, security, and reliability of the Internet.   

• 1+ years of product management or equivalent experience with demonstrated ability to discover opportunities, and then define and deliver products
• Experience presenting new products and features to customers. You are enthusiastic about taking something you have helped build and sharing it with the world
• Experience driving revenue, with a demonstrable track record of business impact 
• Strong customer and stakeholder empathy. You must be not only the voice of the customer, but at various times the voice of marketing, finance, engineering, support and ops. You must be able to channel many points of view
• Proactive in building relationships with various stakeholders across the business
• Exceptional communication, presentation, organizational and analytical skills
• Demonstrated ability to lead, drive consensus and deliver in a matrix organization with multiple stakeholders
• Must be able to define and manage complex process and/or product issues of a broad scope using independent judgment
• Experience balancing execution, agility, and culture at a fast growing business.
• Very strong technical abilities. You are intimately familiar with modern software development practices used to build and deploy applications. You preferably run your own websites and are comfortable working at the terminal level to test products.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to all audiences

Bonus Points

• BS/MS in a technology- or business-related field
• Knowledge of Authoritative and Recursive DNS 
• Knowledge of working with distributed systems
• Experience in building, configuring or using cloud based networking products
• A solid understanding of RESTful API design & documentation
• Hands-on experience with command-line tools used for interacting with APIs, debugging and testing (e.g. curl, dig, etc.)